Since release, we've received a ton of feedback and feature requests from the Alien Swarm community. The most requested additions are more variety and greater difficulty.

With that in mind, we've added "Onslaught" mode, which introduces an AI Director that dynamically generates swarms of aliens based on several factors, such as the squad's stress level. Onslaught works with any difficulty setting and ensures no mission plays the same way twice.

Speaking of difficulty, we've also added a "Brutal" difficulty level for those of you who told us "Insane" wasn't insane enough. How brutal is Brutal? Nobody on the Alien Swarm team has managed to complete a mission on it.

If for some crazy reason Brutal is still too easy for you, there's now a "Hardcore Friendly Fire" toggle. When enabled, friendly fire deals full damage immediately, flamethrowers set teammates on fire much faster, and turrets will hurt you if get caught in their crossfire. HCFF truly tests your team’s ability to work as a elite squad. Coordinating movement and firing lines become an even more integral part of the game.

Since release, we've received a ton of feedback and feature requests from the Alien Swarm community. The most requested additions are more variety and greater difficulty.

With that in mind, we've added "Onslaught" mode, which introduces an AI Director that dynamically generates swarms of aliens based on several factors, such as the squad's stress level. Onslaught works with any difficulty setting and ensures no mission plays the same way twice.

Speaking of difficulty, we've also added a "Brutal" difficulty level for those of you who told us "Insane" wasn't insane enough. How brutal is Brutal? Nobody on the Alien Swarm team has managed to complete a mission on it.

If for some crazy reason Brutal is still too easy for you, there's now a "Hardcore Friendly Fire" toggle. When enabled, friendly fire deals full damage immediately, flamethrowers set teammates on fire much faster, and turrets will hurt you if get caught in their crossfire. HCFF truly tests your teams ability to work as a elite squad. Coordinating movement and firing lines become an even more integral part of the game.

I've been playing a little Alien Swarm this week. It's a pretty good game as is, but that's not why it was provided free of charge. No, it was provided free of charge so you kids could mess with it.

And we're already seeing the fruits of these labours. Shrimpsess over on the Steam forums has posted a long list if command line tweaks you can make to the game, which with just a few characters can introduce a range of features other developers would be charging for as premium downloadable content.

Like the introduction of a "director mode", like the one found in Left 4 Dead, that intelligently spawns enemies. Or an actual, working first-person mode for the game. There are also some minor (though welcome) changes, like shifting the Gears-of-War-a-like "fast reload" system underneath your guy instead of hiding it in the corner and enabling 360 controller support.